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Book Reviews

Benjamin Lewin MW

Published by Wine Appreciation Guild

and Vendange Press

$34.95/£23

Reviewed by Nicholas Faith

It’s extremely rare - dare I say even unique? - for a distinguished scientist previously unconnected with vines or wines to be let loose on the history of Bordeaux. It helps that he is sure to conduct his research with a rigor not generally found among wine writers, to ask awkward questions, and not to be put off with the many answers that don’t satisfy his standards. Moreover, the scientist involved, Dr Benjamin Lewin, cannot be accused of ignorance about wines - he’s a Master of Wine as well as a world expert on genes.
Is anyone here a subscriber to Cell, the review he founded, let alone a reader of books like his Molecular Basis of Gene Expression?
As a result of his background, What Price Bordeaux? ranges far wider and deeper than the title would suggest, covering most of the major elements in Bordeaux’s fascinating history and curious ways with unique - yes, that word again - thoroughness. “My approach,” he writes, “is more quantitative than has been common for a subject that is usually viewed somewhat subjectively” - a rather dour-sounding attitude that happily does not in the least prevent a clear writing style. Moreover, the book’s readability is greatly helped by a series of exemplary charts providing all sorts of useful information, such as that emphasizing the unstoppable rise of Merlot over the past few decades, not only on the Right Bank but in the rest of the Gironde as well.
Only rarely does he stray from the straight and narrow path of scientific rigor, most obviously when he states firmly that “when we are talking about wine, the crucial thing is what we experience when we drink it, however that is described.” When he does relax, he reveals himself as a lover of classical claret. He clearly regrets the arrival of what he describes as a “more international style in some châteaux,” adding: “I believe this represents a decline in elegance - if you go back to older Bordeaux at lower alcohol levels, you can see what we have lost.” Such tastes put him into pretty direct conflict with Robert Parker and his school. For instance, when discussing the 2003 Château Pavie, the wine that revealed so deep a gulf between Parker and British “traditionalists,” he declares bluntly that this “super-ripe fruit bomb with blockbuster tastes” is not “a wine I would
enjoy with food” - his oh-so-sensible touchstone for the value of a wine.
To my great joy, one of Lewin’s most penetrating analyses demonstrates the lack of correlation between Parker’s scores and market values. Retail prices for Parker’s “95-pointers” for the 2005 vintage varied from $600 for Château Margaux down to a mere $44 for Château Monbousquet, another
wine made by one of Parker’s heroes, Gérard Perse, he of Pavie fame. Moreover, one of his charts demonstrates the way in which the garage wines so beloved of Parker proved to be a transient phenomenon that started to fade with the Millennium. In fact, as Lewin clearly proves, the biggest single factor in determining the price of a wine is the one it fetched in the previous vintage. “There is considerable inertia with regards to changing the relative prices of châteaux,” he says. Christian Seely of AXA Millésimes reckons that this delay can be as long as “ten years for improvements, if quality resulting from investment is to be reflected in the price of the wine.” This delay is exploited by many a buyer confident enough of his or her palate to cash in on improving wines before the cautious and lumbering market has caught up with their progress.
Lewin’s general attitude is much the same as those of other observers over the years, combining as it does admiration for Bordeaux’s best wines with “despair at [the producers’] inability to recognize long-term over short-term interests.” Nor is it new to fulminate over the idiocies of INAO - like its insistence on planting unsuitable Cabernet Sauvignon on the Right Bank in the 1960s and ’70s - and the failure to declassify more than 1 percent of the region’s wines from AOC status. This obviously leads to a growing gap between rich and poor, though he provides figures showing that Bordeaux’s growers have nearly doubled their income since 1900 during a period when production has increased by a mere 15 percent. His lack of feel for the market also shows up when he regrets the lack of interest shown by La Place in lesser wines, since many an entrepreneurial grower can find suitable outlets in direct sales to individuals or the restaurant trade. Moreover, he seems to be unaware of the efforts being made by Bordeaux’s proles to provide a greater guarantee of quality in the near future.

Like most of the literature on Bordeaux, Lewin’s book is overly dominated by the 1855 classification; he was naive enough to be surprised when the classed growths refused to let him see the map of the vineyards actually classified in 1855. Not surprisingly, he quotes, approvingly, the remark by an American importer that Bordeaux is about “marques dressed up as terroir.” Nevertheless, he does come to the right conclusion that “present reputation is no more and no less than a snapshot of how successful a château has been in exploiting its terroir of the moment” - in essence a refutation of the idea of the permanence of any classification, apart from, of course, that provided by the market.
Inevitably much of the ground he covers is familiar, but he usually finds something original to say even on such well-known subjects as the drainage by the Dutch of the marshes along the Gironde, which, as he points out, lowered the overall water table and thus helped the quality of the wine produced on the precious gravel along the Médoc. Looking at the very varied wines produced in 1855, neat or “fortified,” he can legitimately ask whether there were “in fact any consumers who knew the taste of the unadulterated wines of the Médoc at the time?” I was also glad that he agrees with me, implicitly anyway, in stating that grafted vines were introduced rather later than the 1890s—indeed, that the Graves wasn’t completely turned over to grafted vines until after World War I.
Even a keen error-spotter like me is rarely able to find a quibble, though my eyebrows did shoot up when, in the context of the region’s many “vintages of the century,” he says that “1961 is now all but forgotten.” There are still a few worth drinking, and I hope that the royalties from his excellent book will enable Dr Lewin to buy a bottle of Palmer.

From Demon to Darling

A Legal History of Wine in America

Published by University of California Press

£17.95/US$29.95

Reviewed by Lisa Granik JSD MW

As a child growing up in the control state of Pennsylvania, I well remember our trips to the state store to buy wine. Our town was dry, so we had to drive to the next town over. There, the store’s measly selection and stark, apothecary-like presentation made wine purchasing as attractive as a hospital meal. No wonder we looked forward to summers in New Jersey, where the selection was broader, the prices smarter, and wine merchants could speak intelligently about wine.
Later, during university years in the District of Columbia, when the drinking age there was still 18 and wine shops had the right to import many wines directly from the producers, the ample selection allowed me to indulge my wine hobby along with my studies. But it was yet more of a culture shock when I discovered one-stop shopping just over the Potomac River in Virginia, where even supermarkets sold wine.
This tiny sampling of varying state legal regimes is nothing new to anyone who has traveled among the 50 states: Alcohol regulations differ maddeningly (if not comically) among them - indeed, sometimes even within states. For someone sufficiently intrepid to sell wine, beer, or alcohol in the United States, it appears less a “more perfect Union” than a confederation of over 50 different jurisdictions. In From Demon to Darling, Richard Mendelson does an admirable job of trying to bring coherence to what is an incoherent, inefficient, and largely anachronistic state of affairs. Few would be as qualified to undertake such an effort: Apart from teaching wine law at the University of California at Berkeley, Mendelson’s legal career has embraced all aspects of the field - and he owns a small vineyard, to boot.
The best way to explain and understand wine law, Mendelson argues, is by looking at its historical development. This makes sense, since American wine law’s evolution has largely been a reaction to a variety of historical and social forces since colonial times, and these forces persist today. Thus, From Demon to Darling is effectively a “hornbook” designed for law students and lawyers seeking to understand the evolution of the legal tradition on a particular subject. One of the book’s virtues is Mendelson’s compression of a complicated legal history into a relatively short volume. He successfully references the social factors influencing or embracing alcohol control to pursue their own agenda: The book is spiced with characters from the early women’s movements concerned about the relationship between alcohol and violence against women and children; wealthy capitalists intent on maintaining productive laborers; and nationalists directing their anti-immigrant sentiment at German-American beer gardens and Irish saloons. The most engaging part of the book is the first chapter, enlivened by fun facts - the origin of the word teetotaler, for example, derives from the American Temperance Society members’ pledge of total abstinence, on which they wrote T (total) (p.18).
Unfortunately, the following three quarters of the book, which detail the state and federal government strategies to regulate alcohol following Repeal, may be a hard slog only a lawyer could love. Mendelson presents the various approaches states employ to regulate the liquor industry and demonstrates the dizzyingly diverse ways in which the states (and/or local jurisdictions) implement them: state liquor monopolies; local option; licensing restrictions; price controls; and most notoriously, the three-tier system, with wholesalers as gatekeepers between producers (or importers) and retailers.
For wine enthusiasts, it is distressing how the initial promise of the American experiment, at least in terms of alcohol regulation, ran awry. The settlers and colonial governments designed the earliest wine laws to develop an American wine tradition, in keeping with the Jeffersonian ideal of the agrarian nation. A surprising fact emerging from Mendelson’s book is that it is a misleading oversimplification to blame America’s Puritan tradition for the Republic’s hostile attitude to alcohol: The pilgrims who sailed to America embraced alcohol, not only as “a gift to be revered” but “safer to drink than water,” even with “rejuvenative powers” (p.8). The Puritan work ethic then demanded temperance, however, which was defined as consumption in moderation. When Reverend Increase Mather declared that “[t]he wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil” (p.8), the problem was not alcohol per se but rather intemperance.
Unfortunately, early attempts at viticulture failed, so an indigenous wine-enjoying culture failed to take root as well. Meanwhile, by the early 1800s, the definition of temperance had evolved from moderate consumption to total abstinence. Social prejudices converged with the anxieties of a nation without traditional social hierarchies, and the rise of Christian evangelism later served to promote a 19th-century “zero tolerance” attitude to wine and spirits. Early temperance movements distinguished wine from spirits, as did the US government; the latter’s first Internal Revenue act was an excise tax on whiskey designed to pay down Revolutionary War debts.
As the 19th century progressed, control of public drunkenness failed, and temperance advocates shifted the state’s attention from the drunkard to the server, urging local officials to limit the number of liquor licenses. As many as a dozen states passed local option laws; some included wine, others did not. Local option laws were popular with state politicians, allowing them to avoid taking a position on alcohol control by delegating responsibility to the local authorities. In jurisdictions where local option was enacted, the response presaged that to national prohibition, with laws being overturned or simply not enforced. Temperance activists came to see that the only solution rested in national prohibition.
The Supreme Court also became involved through a series of cases rooted in the same question vexing the wine trade today: namely the states’ ability to regulate interstate commerce. Mendelson successfully explains the issues of consitutional jurisprudence, as well as the origins of many current restrictions on the sale of alcohol, such as the “tied-house” prohibition. A rather unsavory urban institution before prohibition was the saloon, which was often tied to individual alcohol producers. In exchange for monthly payments and a pledge to sell only a specified brand, brewers provided the saloon with everything from bars and mirrors, to licenses and leases. Although some saloons offered some social benefits, such as shelter for the unemployed and venues for unions and cultural associations, many were centers for electoral corruption and other criminal activity.
Mendelson’s exhaustively detailed story leading up to and through national prohibition illustrates the dangers that befall an industry too fragmented to defend its own interests, and of interest groups who manage to outmaneuver popular opinion to change policy.
Curiously, World War I facilitated prohibition, with calls for personal sacrifice and censure on all things German to include beer and wine. Congressional debate on the Eighteenth Amendment was “surprisingly limited and prompt,” and resistance to national prohibition seemed futile once the beer and wine industries could not carve out an exception for low-alcohol beer and wine due to their inability to define “low alcohol.” Following ratification, Congress charged the Treasury with enforcing prohibition, as it was familiar with the industry through its taxation powers. The number of exceptions to prohibition - home winemaking and personal possession and consumption, for example - presented a daunting task, as did the immediate opposition to the new state of affairs. Mendelson colorfully describes the ways in which consumers, doctors, clergymen, and entrepreneurs conspired to satisfy the public thirst, taking advantage of these exceptions; trade in medicinal liquor and tonics flourished, and countless people suddenly got religion.
The seeds for prohibition’s downfall lay in the degree to which it contributed to popular disregard for the law and revealed a government incompetent to enforce laws contrary to embedded cultural practices. Ironically, those who had promoted prohibition turned against it: Women and the middle class saw prohibition corrupting all elements of society, and the medical profession resisted ill-informed legislative interference in the exercise of their professional duties. Even the notion of moral reform became tainted by its association with a movement driven by fanatics. Unfortunately for American wine culture, while wine consumption increased during prohibition, due to home winemaking, it decimated the wine industry and encouraged a switch from beer to spirits.
Congress designed the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing the Eighteenth, to avoid past problems such as tied-house relationships and criminal activity in the liquor trade. The freedom for each state to devise its own regulatory pattern made a patchwork of legal regimes inevitable.
The book’s final chapter explores the social, political, and industry forces working to shape public debate and policy as an indigenous wine culture emerged. Beverage alcohol remains sufficiently sensitive a topic for industry members, legislators, regulators, judges, special-interest groups, and consumers all to have differing viewpoints on topics such as wine labeling, public health, and free trade. The continued fragmentation of the wine industry and conflicting interests among its members has inhibited a concerted effort to promote legislation benefiting the industry and consumers. Thus, the American appellation system is less a reflection of distinguished areas than an approximation grounded in political compromises.
It is not unusual in common-law jurisdictions for the law to lag behind forces of social change. The wine industry has grown in the USA despite all the governmental roadblocks; there are now wineries in all 50 states. Equally, a wine culture is emerging, with centers of gravity in California and the urban East Coast. Mass communication and the development of Internet commerce have brought into great relief the numerous barriers to free trade in wine, disparate treatment among producers, and the limited selection afforded to those living in places that restrict the purchase of alcohol. One of the most significant upcoming battles is the right for consumers to purchase wines from retailers outside their own state. At issue in these battles are the many concerns that motivated anti-alcohol activists in the past: morality, religion, social stability, personal health, and public safety. The concept of a “sin tax,” Mendelson notes, is “deeply embedded in American culture.” Indeed, many jurisdictions are now raising taxes on alcohol to stem budget shortfalls.
Mendelson rightly asserts in conclusion that for an American wine culture to flourish, the industry must actively embrace education - not only terroirs and wine’s role in a healthy lifestyle, but also the risks and the need for responsible consumption.
This meticulously documented volume provides the definitive background for understanding the competing legal, political, economic, and social forces shaping the ongoing evolution of America’s wine culture.

 

 

David Downie

Food Wine: The Italian Riviera and Genoa

Food Wine: Rome (Terroir Guides)

Published by Little Bookroom
£16.99/US$24.95

Reviewed by Andrea Sturniolo

In Food Wine: The Italian Riviera and Genoa, David Downie reveals the
many wonders of the overlooked Italian region of Liguria. This narrow strip, between the north of Tuscany and the French Riviera, is divided by the author into 12 areas from east to west, with a chapter on each. There are also two introductory chapters - one on food, the other on wine.
Despite the enthusiasm of the author in describing all the delicacies on offer as “famous,” “prized,” or “renowned,” I am sure that only the most educated foodies will have the faintest idea of what the region’s larder contains beyond pesto and olive oil.
As for the region’s wines, how many people out of a hundred would be able to name five of the grape varieties used? A book on these subjects needed to be more than a guide to the region, and happily this delivers in that sense, being first an educational book about what visitors can expect to find, and only second a guide per se. This is a book best read and savored before a trip to the Italian Riviera.
Ligurian food is among the most delicate, subtle, yet flavorful in all Italy. Downie describes it as “delicate,” “refined,” even “ethereal.” Among the northern Italian regions, Liguria is somewhat the odd one out where food is concerned. For example, it generally favors olive oil over butter or lard as a cooking fat and makes extensive use of fresh aromatic herbs and garlic. This results in fresh, elegant, and vibrant flavors. The extremely long cooking times of other Italian classics like Piedmont’s brasato, Milan’s cassoeula, or indeed Naples’s ragù are nowhere to be seen in Liguria, and certainly this all helps for an easier digestion. Downie knows this well
and manages to communicate his enthusiasm to the reader, stressing in particular the two main points to remember about the local cuisine.
The first is how different the food can be, moving from east to west. The author says that “strictly speaking, no single Riviera cuisine exists,” and this is certainly true, even if the same could also be said of the other 19 Italian regions. The second point is that although “Liguria is a narrow strip of land, and just about anyone on it stares at the sea […]. Residents often shun fresh fish, preferring chard, chestnut, mushrooms, rabbit and boar.” The region’s favorite fish are air-dried cod and salted anchovies, so order sea bass or lobster in a restaurant and you will seem like the Milanese, who “consider Liguria their playground and beach resort.”
Food Wine: Rome is a book that anyone heading for the Eternal City should buy and read. Not only does Downie have insider knowledge of the restaurants, delis, and wine shops of the city, but he also manages to involve the reader with such an enthusiasm that at times I had the impression of having a steaming hot plate of cacio e pepe right under my nose. His in-depth knowledge of local food, wine, and tradition is commendable to the point where I would recommend any publisher to get the work translated into Italian and sell it in Rome itself for the benefit of the locals. But proud as the Italians are when it comes to food, it might be worth publishing it under an Italian-sounding pseudonym: Davide Piumetta should do nicely.
This book, like all the others in the same series, is not simply about the best restaurants in town, but rather about the best with local cuisine. International successes such as Heinz Beck’s La Pergola or La Rosetta are listed only briefly under the heading “non-terroir top or trendy tables.”
The Italian capital is divided into nine areas, and there is a chapter on each (plus a tenth on “outlying areas”). The first 75 of the 384 pages are dedicated to introducing the locals’ approach to food and wine. As someone who has specialized in Lazio’s wines, I must confess to having found the wine part a touch tedious, since the listed producers are merely the cream of the crop of those who have received the most awards from the many Italian wine guides, with none of the author’s own discoveries. Nevertheless, I am sure that this part of the book will still be useful to most readers.
The author explains very well some concepts that are particularly Italian when it comes to running a successful restaurant, like preferring to buy from the best patisserie in town (and boast about it with a certain pride) rather than employing a dedicated pastry chef. The same concept applies to fresh pasta.
Having lived in Rome for a few years, one of the first tests to which I subjected this book was to see whether it listed my own favorite “real Rome” spots. The book managed to score an impressive 17/20 in this respect: It missed only one wine shop, one deli, and one restaurant from my very personal top 20. Even that score might be a little harsh, in that the missing deli is in a neighborhood not really covered by the book, and the restaurant has no sign on the door.

Carlo Capalbo

Collio: Fine Wines and Foods from

Italy's North East

Published by Pallas Athene

£8.99/US$29.95

Reviewed by Stuart George

The tiny northeast Italian (Friulian) wine region of Collio - its name probably confused with an American rapper by some people - has long been praised for the distinction and excellence of its best wines.
For a few dedicated gourmands - notably Fred Plotkin, author of the excellent but now sadly out-of-print La Terra Fortunata: The Splendid Food and Wine of Friuli Venezia-Giulia - Friuli has the best food in Italy.
Having lived and worked in Friuli for six months a few years ago, gaining 14lb (6.3kg) in weight during that period, I am bound to agree.
It is a region that has become increasingly dynamic in recent years. Pioneers and iconoclasts such as Mario Schiopetto (who passed away in 2003) and Josko Gravner have handed the baton to a younger generation
that is stamping its own style on its interpretation of the Collio terroir.
It is easy to see why Carla Capalbo was drawn to this lovely but still
largely unknown part of Italy to produce a worthy companion to her
splendid The Food and Wine Guide to Naples and Campania, which was reviewed in WFW 9. As with that book, Collio was researched, written, and photographed entirely by Capalbo. She did all the photography using “colour slide film and three vintage Nikon cameras with a handful of lenses - nothing digital!”
The book is organized into five “zones,” with the spotlight on Gorizia and its surrounding territories, and focuses on wineries, restaurants, food artisans, and agriturismo. It is all very informative and practical as a travel guide, but the author’s passion for fine food and wine is also very apparent and engaging.
Carla Capalbo has certainly done a wonderful job in introducing the earthly - and sometimes heavenly - delights of Collio to a wider audience. According to a label on its back cover, the book is also certified carbon neutral - bravissima, Carla!